Flickchart vs. MovieWeb

As many of you may know or have heard, the website MovieWeb.com revealed a feature named “Face-Off” on Saturday, April 16th with a descriptive blog post, “Movie Face-Off Is Here!“. We were alarmed to discover that this feature was not a unique take on ranking or rating films, but instead a rather obvious duplication of the concept, functionality, user interface, and formatting of Flickchart.

We wholeheartedly welcome fair competition and innovation, but when faced with what is plainly obvious to us and others that MovieWeb has knowingly copied, reproduced, and duplicated what we have worked to perfect over the years and refer to it as their own new idea, we feel their attempt is neither morally right, nor is it legal. MovieWeb has never contacted us formally or informally to indicate interest in licensing the use of Flickchart – which we would have certainly considered if approached, as we would of any potential business partners.

After consideration of our options, we, with our lawyers, sent MovieWeb a letter, fax, and email informing them of their infringements of our intellectual property rights, their breach of contract of our terms of service, and indication of their unfair competitive practices. We also supplied several visual examples of this duplication to MovieWeb (see below). MovieWeb was asked to remove the offending features from their site, but have refused.

As a result, we plan to file suit against MovieWeb seeking statutory damages, actual damages, punitive damages, disgorgement of MovieWeb’s profits, injunctive relief, and an award of attorney’s fees and costs.

We’d like to sincerely appreciate our friends, fellow professionals in the film community, and the users of Flickchart for your heartfelt support.

You can click the thumbnails below to review the examples of MovieWeb’s infringement, and our legal communication to MovieWeb, for yourself.

UPDATE – 12:35 Eastern, Saturday, April 23, 2011:

MovieWeb has since been attempting to superficially change their interface to look less like Flickchart. Click the thumbnail to see the changes:

Nathan Chase is a co-founder and the designer of Flickchart. He's also a multimedia designer & developer living in central Florida, an online culture and social networking enthusiast, a proud father, an avid PC gamer, an incessant movie watcher, known for an eclectic musical taste, periodically avoiding being shot by paintballs, and often writing and performing music - on the drums, guitar, piano, or computer.
You can find Nathan on Flickchart as Zampa, and email him at nathan@flickchart.com.

One almost has to wonder if the apocalypse of humankind is upon us when people like those at Movieweb can be confronted with irrefutable examples of their wrongdoing and actually refuse to acknowledge it. I think I’ll go pick up a copy of War & Peace, change around a few sentences and re-title it “Conflict & Tranquilty” and claim it as my own. Or maybe copy the Mona Lisa, but give her blonde hair and call it Mandy Lindstrom.

As all of us understand when comparing two similar movies that the first one we see establishes the baseline for the match. The second movie needs to seriously establish its own identity in order to avoid being dismissed out of hand. Wyatt Earp is generally respected, but Tombstone gets all the love. Everything else being equal, it would still come down to this: Val Kilmer was amazing and the best anyone has said about Dennis Quaid’s performance as Doc Holliday was that it was different from Kilmer’s.

Note for note, it’s the exact same thing. They even have the pie charts. It’s just sickening how lazy and unimaginative these MovieWeb goons are. I’m sure at the end of the day, karma will give them their just deserts.

This is astonishing. It’s hard to believe that there are people who steal/copy work from others and claim it as their own. In an age where there is so much potential and so many available tools for creativity, how does someone turn to theft? Laziness. Shameful.

[…] that any industry has its hacks, but evidence that they have no shame. Luckily the good folks at Flickchart have gone on the offensive. We support them, as we never really liked those MovieWeb guys, anyway. They always picked us last […]